June 1, 2011

Wednesday Linkspam

As always, if you see something cool about asexuality that I missed or you wrote something neat, please feel free to link that here in the comments!

Also, the Carnival of Aces round two deadline is being extended, apparently! (Which is good news for me, because I still haven’t figured out how to effectively say what I want to say on the topic.) Ily’s round-up for the carnival so far has been posted and will be updated as more people submit. The next round of the carnival is still moving on to Skeptic’s Play, though! Siggy has chosen the topic of community for his round.

However, if you ask somebody who is asexual if they have ever been discriminated against, made to feel unsafe, or verbally or physically assaulted because they were asexual, IME chances are pretty high that they will have a lot of examples for you. We have to listen to what they have to say and stop telling them to shut up.

A friend and fellow Lasher posted a piece on her blog explaining why, as a heteroromantic asexual, she identifies as queer and participates in queer communities. She has come under attack for this, including being told that she is straight. One of the arguments is that, in referring to the fact that she has been welcomed into other queer spaces, she is speaking on behalf of queer people, and thereby abusing her so-called straight privilege. So, I’m here to speak up on behalf of myself, as a queer person who recognises her as queer.

Over at tumblr, they’re putting together a sexual privilege checklist. After some typically nasty protests from the usual suspects, they appear to be trying to eliminate all overlap between sexual privilege and heterosexual privilege. As far as I understand it, anything that can happen under both is removed from the sexual privilege box and put solely into the heterosexual privilege box.

I have conversations about whether asexual people, especially heteroromantic and aromantic and I JUST DON’T KNOW YET, STOP TRYING TO MAKE ME CHOOSE A LABEL SO YOU CAN DECIDE WHETHER I’M A VALID PERSON OR NOT, I DON’T EVEN KNOW IF I’M ASEXUAL, ALL I KNOW IS THAT I CRAVE A RELATIONSHIP OF SOME UNDEFINED AND NOVEL AND POSSIBLY IMPOSSIBLE FORM WITH ANOTHER MAN/OTHER MEN BUT IF I’M AROMANTIC I GUESS I’M STILL NOT GOOD ENOUGH FOR YOU romantic asexuals should be allowed into queer spaces.

Inspired by the recent attempts to tease out whether or not sexual privilege exists, I decided to start a place where we could make a community effort to compile some of the less-frequently talked about negative experiences of being ace, grey-ace, or demi.

So, let’s say for simplicity’s sake that either sexual privilege exists or it doesn’t. This may in fact not be a yes or no clear cut question because questions about human beings are almost never as clear cut as they seem, but let’s just pretend it is. In this case, we have two answers.

Why do some asexuals want the label “queer” for themselves in the first place? Well there are so, so many possible reasons and motivations for that that if I tried to examine them all I’d be here all night (you might’ve noticed I have a tendancy to ramble… just a bit). So instead, I’ll talk about one specific ace-case: myself.

The pressure from the asexual community for romantic asexuals to participate in sexual activity for the sake of their partner needs to stop. Because if the asexual wants to provide sexually, that’s great and wonderful and all that. But if they don’t want to, they shouldn’t be pressured by their support network.

I remember once when I was sitting with a group of five asexuals, and someone commented on having felt like they were forcing themselves into sex. All but one of us had similar experiences before we learned the term asexual.

I think what’s important to remember is that if a man is asexual, he is no less obliged or unconcerned with the rules of masculinity his culture has set for him than sexual men are. An asexual man is not magically insensitive to society’s judgment of his masculinity and manhood just because he is asexual. Therefore, if and when a man comes to the conclusion that he is an asexual, he has far more reason to hide that identity than to reveal it.

One thing I do to boost my contacts, across various venues, is go through really interesting conversations looking for people to friend or otherwise network with. I’ve done that several times with conversations about asexuality. And I’ve noticed something: asexuals are a lot less connective than average.

“The pressure from the asexual community for romantic asexuals to participate in sexual activity for the sake of their partner needs to stop. … if they don’t want to, they shouldn’t be pressured by their support network.”

This is a great point actually. I admit I’m a little guilty of this myself – simply because virtually all the asexual-sexual success stories I’ve heard of do in fact involve a compromise on the part of both partners. But yeah, I’ll be more careful in future.